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OPERA WEB BROWSER MOVING OVER TO WEBKIT
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KingArthur
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Closehttp://www.opera.com/press/releases/2013/02/13/
To provide a leading browser on Android and iOS, this year Opera will make a gradual transition to the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for most of its upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers.
"The WebKit engine is already very good, and we aim to take part in making it even better. It supports the standards we care about, and it has the performance we need," says CTO of Opera Software, Håkon Wium Lie. "It makes more sense to have our experts working with the open source communities to further improve WebKit and Chromium, rather than developing our own rendering engine further. Opera will contribute to the WebKit and Chromium projects, and we have already submitted our first set of patches: to improve multi-column layout."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569106-93/opera-embraces-webkit-in-browser-brain-transplant/
Opera Software, an independent voice in the browser market since the 1990s, will dramatically change its strategy this year by adopting the WebKit browser engine used by Safari and Chrome.
The Norwegian company announced the move today and said it will show off the first fruits of the work with a WebKit-based version of its Android browser at the Mobile World Congress show in less than two weeks. But the company will move to WebKit for its desktop browser, too.
A browser engine processes the Web page instructions written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS then renders the results on screens. The engine is increasingly important as the developer world expands from static Web pages to dynamic Web apps.
While this will be of minor news to most people, this is sad news for us developers and enthusiasts since this means the death of Presto (Opera's in-house web browser engine) and consolidation of major web browser engines into now just Gecko (Mozilla), Trident (Microsoft), WebKit (Google/Apple), and other smaller engines like KHTML (KDE).
Opera as we used to know it will slowly devolve into just another fork of Chromium, which is the base browser from which Google Chrome is derived.
RIP Opera, you will be missed.
I hope they don't introduce Chrome's biggest flaw/bug when they move to Webkit (whereby closing the last tab closes the entire browser, contrary to user expectations).
This is kind of sad, though. I use Opera almost exclusively (except when I need to use ActiveX (which is still more common than you might expect, especially for business applications)). I stopped using Firefox when all they were becoming was an inferior Opera clone with 18,000,000 versions, and Chrome is not nearly as feature rich as Opera (and has that big bug mentioned above).
However, this is contrary to the rumor I heard 6+ months ago that Opera was going to be bought by Facebook :o
This is kind of sad, though. I use Opera almost exclusively (except when I need to use ActiveX (which is still more common than you might expect, especially for business applications)). I stopped using Firefox when all they were becoming was an inferior Opera clone with 18,000,000 versions, and Chrome is not nearly as feature rich as Opera (and has that big bug mentioned above).
However, this is contrary to the rumor I heard 6+ months ago that Opera was going to be bought by Facebook :o
I agree with KingArthur.
Some people, though, wish for ALL browsers to move to webkit.
I wonder why that is?
Some people, though, wish for ALL browsers to move to webkit.
I wonder why that is?
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The fewer systems there are to design software for, the easier software design is.
Though I'm not sure what all exactly is included in Webkit, it sounds like this is FANTASTIC news for web developers, who currently have a nightmare on their hands trying to make their code work on a billion different web browsers, which all render pages differently. Probably 90% of web design is taken up by trying to get a page that looks and acts correctly on one browser to also look and act that same way on all the others. If the end result of this change is that two of the major browsers render pages identically, or even near-identically, I will be SO FUCKING THRILLED
Though I'm not sure what all exactly is included in Webkit, it sounds like this is FANTASTIC news for web developers, who currently have a nightmare on their hands trying to make their code work on a billion different web browsers, which all render pages differently. Probably 90% of web design is taken up by trying to get a page that looks and acts correctly on one browser to also look and act that same way on all the others. If the end result of this change is that two of the major browsers render pages identically, or even near-identically, I will be SO FUCKING THRILLED
Travio
149
author=LockeZ
The fewer systems there are to design software for, the easier software design is.
Though I'm not sure what all exactly is included in Webkit, it sounds like this is FANTASTIC news for web developers, who currently have a nightmare on their hands trying to make their code work on a billion different web browsers, which all render pages differently. Probably 90% of web design is taken up by trying to get a page that looks and acts correctly on one browser to also look and act that same way on all the others. If the end result of this change is that two of the major browsers render pages identically, or even near-identically, I will be SO FUCKING THRILLED
This - entirely this. This is my day job, designing and implementing web applications (whether for the internet or an intranet), and making it work on all browsers is a pain in the ass headache, especially when Webkit has features in it right now, even if it is only in the betas, that other development engines haven't even started work on (meaning they'll be a long time in coming to full version usage). There's nothing more annoying than having to write up JavaScript workarounds because X% of the userbase has an engine that can't support the one feature your application needs.
author=LockeZ
The fewer systems there are to design software for, the easier software design is.
Though I'm not sure what all exactly is included in Webkit, it sounds like this is FANTASTIC news for web developers, who currently have a nightmare on their hands trying to make their code work on a billion different web browsers, which all render pages differently. Probably 90% of web design is taken up by trying to get a page that looks and acts correctly on one browser to also look and act that same way on all the others. If the end result of this change is that two of the major browsers render pages identically, or even near-identically, I will be SO FUCKING THRILLED
The flip side is that all web browser engines are supposed to output near-identical data. While browser engines back 5~10 years ago would've been all over the place, with Gecko being one of the more accurate engines, today Gecko, Trident, Presto, and Webkit (among others) all have only very minor rendering discrepancies if there are any at all. All browser engines adhere to the HTML and CSS standards put forth by the W3C, so by design the output of all the engines are near-identical.
What this basically means is that today, web developers don't have to worry as much about how their code renders on a given browser engine and can spend that effort and time on writing better code.
What Presto's demise in this situation also means is that there are less choices on how to render a webpage. While the output of the various engines are all near-identical, how they go about actually processing the information in order to render the data is vastly different in each browser engine implementation. Consolidation and elimination of browser engines is ultimately a net loss for all of us because it means we've lost one unique way of interpreting HTML/CSS and visually rendering them; the method utilized by Presto might not be the most ideal, it might even be terrible (not to say it is), but the simple presence of Presto being there kept an avenue open for developers to take when tackling how to go about rendering webpages. The loss of Presto really is a sad day.
author=kentona
I hope they don't introduce Chrome's biggest flaw/bug when they move to Webkit (whereby closing the last tab closes the entire browser, contrary to user expectations).
I 'lock' and 'protect' my first tab in Firefox to avoid this. And so that it asks me if I want to close when I hit the close button.
I would assume Opera and Chrome have such a feature too.
DFalcon
2141
author=K-hos
I 'lock' and 'protect' my first tab in Firefox to avoid this. And so that it asks me if I want to close when I hit the close button.
I would assume Opera and Chrome have such a feature too.
Chrome doesn't as a normally exposed setting. There seem to be some extensions, though I don't use them myself. (I haven't been down to only one browser tab in years, probably.)
author=kentona
I hope they don't introduce Chrome's biggest flaw/bug when they move to Webkit (whereby closing the last tab closes the entire browser, contrary to user expectations).
That's not a Webkit behaviour.
author=K-hosOpera doesn't do that, by default.author=kentonaI 'lock' and 'protect' my first tab in Firefox to avoid this. And so that it asks me if I want to close when I hit the close button.
I hope they don't introduce Chrome's biggest flaw/bug when they move to Webkit (whereby closing the last tab closes the entire browser, contrary to user expectations).
I would assume Opera and Chrome have such a feature too.
author=FlyingJesterThank god. There is hope afterall.author=kentonaThat's not a Webkit behaviour.
I hope they don't introduce Chrome's biggest flaw/bug when they move to Webkit (whereby closing the last tab closes the entire browser, contrary to user expectations).
Dyhalto
7536
So what does this mean for a dumb user? I don't care about the inner workings or how it affects developers. I just want my Opera to work the same way it always has (plus upgrades in the future).
Opera will close the last tab and open up a 'blank' tab in it's place. No need for any special settings or prompts.
It's a pretty essential feature if you're the type of person who opens everything in a bunch of tabs (eg. forum threads), then navigates by closing the working one when finished.
author=K-hos
I 'lock' and 'protect' my first tab in Firefox to avoid this. And so that it asks me if I want to close when I hit the close button.
I would assume Opera and Chrome have such a feature too.
Opera will close the last tab and open up a 'blank' tab in it's place. No need for any special settings or prompts.
It's a pretty essential feature if you're the type of person who opens everything in a bunch of tabs (eg. forum threads), then navigates by closing the working one when finished.
Travio
149
author=Dyhalto
So what does this mean for a dumb user? I don't care about the inner workings or how it affects developers. I just want my Opera to work the same way it always has (plus upgrades in the future).
At the end of the day, there'll be very little change that you'll see aside from, perhaps, an almost irrelevant amount of change to render time (as I recall, the Opera engine was slightly better about render speed). It'll also have access to some CSS features that Opera didn't have before because of how Webkit is currently sitting in development - so you might see more web pages 'as intended' (as I know a lot of people design for Webkit browsers and ignore anything else).
author=Travio
(as I know a lot of people design for Webkit browsers and ignore anything else).
Ironic how we used to bitch and moan about how everyone was coding for Trident (read: IE6), but everyone coding for WebKit is causing less of a fuss (not going to say it's acceptable because it isn't).
Travio
149
author=KingArthurauthor=TravioIronic how we used to bitch and moan about how everyone was coding for Trident (read: IE6), but everyone coding for WebKit is causing less of a fuss (not going to say it's acceptable because it isn't).
(as I know a lot of people design for Webkit browsers and ignore anything else).
The only complaints I remember making was having to write specifically for Trident because it ran everything different from how the other web browsers did it. It's also less of an issue to design for non-Trident engines at this point, as it can pretty much all be done just by tossing prefixes on your CSS and calling it a day. Trident as of IE9 (as I recall, it's still Trident there) still required workarounds to work properly with a number of common functions and CSS lines - to the point of Chrome Frame being developed just so people could avoid having to deal with it.
But yeah, this is a large part of my job - I sit there for most of the day doing front end write ups to make our websites work in the various engines. I was hired as a backend developer, but ended being shuffled to doing frontend work after it was discovered that, gasp, I can do it - there seems to be a noted lack of frontend developers in my city, apparently, who can integrate it successfully with most backend work.
I've read that ultimately, the Opera folk are planning on making Opera just a fork of Chromium.
Because Webkit is much, much more standards compliant that Trident is. Webkit, KHTML, and Gecko all behaved pretty similarly, whereas Trident just did whatever it felt like. Or at least it used to be that way.
author=KingArthurauthor=TravioIronic how we used to bitch and moan about how everyone was coding for Trident (read: IE6), but everyone coding for WebKit is causing less of a fuss (not going to say it's acceptable because it isn't).
(as I know a lot of people design for Webkit browsers and ignore anything else).
Because Webkit is much, much more standards compliant that Trident is. Webkit, KHTML, and Gecko all behaved pretty similarly, whereas Trident just did whatever it felt like. Or at least it used to be that way.
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